Author Archive

This installment of Sales Entertainment brings a 7-minute video clip of Kenny Brooks, the funniest door-to-door salesman ever. And probably a very successful one. There are several other clips of Kenny at work, and this is the first. If you go looking, you’ll also find some claims that he was shot and killed while working, but these seem to be a case of mistaken identity.

Enjoy the clip, and be glad you don’t sell door-to-door and have to compete with Kenny.

One of the things that we will be doing is creating lots of our own videos on sales-related topics and on the ASPEC and OPM products, and also publishing videos from other sources that might be interesting to sales professionals. One of the first of those was in the first of our Entertainment articles – the clip from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross featuring Alec Baldwin’s famous “always be selling” rant.

To get started on our own productions, we’ve created a series of three introductory videos to ASPEC Cloud. In a previous article, Keith Thompson introduced you to ASPEC, so you can learn about the meaning of the ASPEC acronym and the development and explanation of the unique and patented ASPEC Sales Methodology there.

Or, if you want to sit back and watch, these three videos are done in a “marketing how-to” style, explaining some of the use of the application while also describing what is going on in the background to apply the methodology to your sales opportunities.

One of the first reactions sales professionals have to ASPEC is that it seems like magic and therefore not really a serious tool. This is because the program has been designed to be extremely easy to use while at the same time providing an unprecedented level of support and guidance to the user. For example, two dates and two multiple choice questions yield a probability/risk assessment and a priority for working the opportunity. This seems like, well, magic.

That’s something that we’re going to discuss, along with many other related questions, in this category of sales topics. We’ll answer these questions, ask others, try to generate some debate and raise more questions and awareness, and maybe move the subject forward a little.

Moving forward is the primary goal of this category. Why? Because we’re already so far behind.

Let’s go back to the original question – what is sales education? It’s not sales training, although that is an important subject and we will cover it in this category. Comparing sales training to sales education is like comparing army boot camp to a college degree.

Productivity is the measure of the efficiency of production. If it takes me an hour to do a task, and I find a way to do it in 55 minutes, I’ve increased my productivity. In sales, production means the number of opportunities worked, and the ratio of wins to losses. Increasing my productivity means more opportunities worked in the same amount of time, and a higher number of won sales in relation to my total number of opportunities.

Sounds simple enough.

So first, increased productivity requires increased efficiency in the number of opportunities worked per unit of time. I can increase my efficiency through technology by automating tasks, or through tools to triage my leads and opportunities and separate the wheat from the chaff, or through processes that keep me organized and focused and use my time effectively, or through territory management to eliminates wasted travel time, or through … well, the list goes on and on, doesn’t it?

Introduction to this, introduction to that, introduction to something else. And now and introduction to the summary of introductions. Is this entire site an introduction to something? Can it introduce me to Selma Hayek?

If you want to leave and go get a beer, we understand.

Introductions, of course, are the drawback of a launch week for a content-heavy web resource. You have to start somewhere, and when you’re offering as much information and knowledge and opinion as we are, it all needs an introduction. If nothing else, you need a roadmap to navigate the content and a guide for future articles.

Well, so are we. But since, strictly speaking, this is not a work day, why not lighten it up a bit?

Saturdays will be our mellow day, where we’ll offer some diversion from the proposal you’re preparing or the forecast that’s due Monday or the lawn that needs mowing or any of the myriad of other items in your “Honey Do” and “Get To Work” lists.

To start, we’re offering a sales classic. We recently discovered that there are sales pros out there who haven’t seen this. And those of us who have, we would love to see it again. It’s Alec Baldwin, circa 1992, back before he and Kim Basinger were even married, let alone mortal enemies. Yes, he had a successful career before Tina Fey made him her boss on 30 Rock.

As I write this, there is a lengthy discussion happening on one of the most popular on-line sales forums on “what’s the difference between the a sales process and a sales method?”

If you were to asked to name a popular sales method, you would probably get the answer of Miller-Heiman or SPIN. But ask someone to name a popular sales process, and you will get a blank stare.

A methodology is a recommended way of achieving something, or, as Wikipedia says, “a guideline system for solving a problem, with specific components such as phases, tasks, methods, techniques and tools.” It doesn’t necessarily spell out sequential steps getting there. Process is more about the sequential steps to get from A to B, and a sales method may or may not have a process associated with it.

These are just a few of the articles we’ll be publishing in this category, General Sales. The criteria for getting here are pretty clear – the subject must be interesting and pertain to sales, the writing must be good, the theme compelling, and the article won’t fit in any of our other categories. Not Methodology nor Productivity nor Education nor Technology, or whatever. Just General.

To give you a preview of what’s coming, Books On Sales is not a book review or an index or anything like that. It’s a short article (we’d call it a rant, but the author is an English Gentleman, and they never rant outside of Parliament) on some of the shortcomings of books about sales. And there are many. Books on sales and shortcomings.

The SalesWays HUB was created by the people behind the unique ASPEC Sales Methodology and the Opportunity Portfolio Management system that puts that into practice. We intend for The HUB to be as non-commercial as possible, but there are limits to that. After all, SalesWays is in the name. We invented ASPEC, and that way of thinking is ingrained in us, and it will naturally bleed over into all of our writing and conversations.

So we’re going to do the next best thing – lump everything specifically related to ASPEC and SalesWays into one category. It will be a great category, to be sure, with lots of very cutting-edge thinking and discussions about products — past, present, and future. And also stories about how we got to where we are. It wasn’t a smooth trip — journeys to new territory seldom are — but it was never boring.